Wayback Machine Safe, Settlement Disappointing

Ex-Lemmingworks. ##.

Every year I try and tell students, and anyone else who will listen, that everything they do on the internet will be around in 10,000 years. I would like people to think of what they do on the internet as a public utterance, and for them to be sure that what they do say, upload, post, is something they know then can feel comfortable with in the future. This Slash/Dot link and the article re-enforce this notion. Even large institutions have to take responsibility for activities on the internet.

Before I became aware of the wayback machine, way back when, one thing that bothered me about the internet was the lack of historicity; something that was posted could be not only removed, but revised, and there was little you could do about it. With the wayback machine keeping snapshots of the net, this becomes more difficult. I wish that google incorporated the wayback machine into its machinery so that you could search over time as well. Well, I’m sure it is there, but I just haven’t given it much thought beyond worrying about students making foolish gaffs.

Lucky for me, all my online gaffs occurred before 1992, which is the oldest record there is for me on the internet. Wheeeeee!

[via Slashdot]

“Healthcare Advocates and the Internet Archive have finally resolved their differences, reaching an undisclosed out-of-court settlement. The suit stemmed from HA’s anger over the Wayback Machine showing pages archived from their site even after they added a robots.txt file to their webserver. While the settlement is good for the Internet Archive, it’s also disappointing because it would have tested HA’s claims in court. As the article notes, you can’t really un-ring the bell of publishing something online, which is exactly what HA wanted to do. Obeying robots.txt files is voluntary, after all, and if the company didn’t want the information online, they shouldn’t have put it there in the first place.”

Internet Archive settles suit over Wayback Machine